Freedom and negation

There can’t be any absolute principle of negation; this is the widespread mistake in the art world, that certain procedures or media are inherently “critical,” and others aren’t. All negation has to be determinate, so to carry on the modernist tradition as it has arrived at minimalism would be to negate geometry, and this did happen. To carry on the tradition of the critical avant-garde would necessarily involve a critique of the ready-made and of conceptuality. This has yet to happen in a productive way, at least in the current context. The “limits,” in the usage of Robert Smithson, have to be rendered visible, and once visible they can easily be crossed. The limits that enable my work are posited by me, they are not given by the society around me. This is not to make abstract painting “personal,” but to make personality, or subjectivity, an effect of art.